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Google disabled my husband's account

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Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#441

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

partiallypro wrote: post #278
kodah wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a startup where we used Google Cloud. Even as a paying customer, when I'd try to talk to their "support" all they would do is try to upsell their consulting partners to answer a question about their own services.

That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.

Azure was down in Australia one night and I randomly sent a tweet to microsoft. To my pleasant surprise they acted on it and resolved it in few minutes. this is the same microsoft that was the villain around 10 years ago

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#442

Post by cnst »

im3w1l wrote: post #432
LurkersWillLurk wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not true in all states that corporations must be represented by an attorney in small claims court. In California, corporations must be represented by a non-attorney employee for small claims actions.

Doesn't that just mean they will get some self-taught lawyer-in-all-but-name?

The idea is that a Small Claims judge in Cali does not expect a lawyer, so, there is no need or expectation to any legal lingo, which by itself can be confusing to normal people, plus the rules of evidence are not nearly as strict as in Superior Court, plus, not that much money is at stake.

The thing that may be daunting about Superior Court is that the judge is supposed to take it easy on pro-se litigants, but at the same time, they are still supposed to be impartial, and can't really act as your own lawyer.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#443

Post by drivebycomment »

m00x wrote: post #159

Before laying down judgement on Google, this is standard procedure for any kind of legal matter / fraud. I work at a bank and it's absolutely critical that we do not let anyone know of our reasons for banning/suspending accounts while there's fraud investigations on the account. Investigations take a long time since we need to determine if the fraud/criminal actions were 100% done by the user of the account, or if th…

Mob doesn't care about reason. They don't care about real possibility that Google has banned the account for the right reason and not divulging is the correct thing to do. It is entirely possible that this is due to a much more severe issue like production or distribution of child pornography or similarly egregious criminal activity that they can't divulge other than to the authorities.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#444

Post by Nextgrid »

usr1106 wrote: post #439
partiallypro wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.

From hearsay Azure has better customer support because they know that in cloud and server environments they are a relative newcomer, traditionally many data center people would run away when they hear Microsoft. Google has the ego of a market leader. They don't care for their customers, that's nothing new.

Despite the (apparently) good support, the decision to "run away" when you hear Microsoft is still justified unfortunately. I've recently had the displeasure to work with Azure and not only the console UI is even worse than AWS but every single service, despite looking similar to the competition, is actually different in subtle ways (which you often don't realize until you get started implementing against it) and forces you to waste time working around some Microsoft dev's attempt at being smart[0].

[0]: as an example, obtaining root on a container in an Azure DevOps CI pipeline. You have to bind-mount the Docker management socket into the container, then use that to gain initial root access and install sudo, then use sudo to run all your commands. I don't recall ever having to do that on any other CI service.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#445

Post by Nextgrid »

johnisgood wrote: post #341
breakingcups wrote: post #83

It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…

> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able…

Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#446

Post by Nextgrid »

pb7 wrote: post #358
tpxl wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is trivial to put every criminal to prison: put everyone in prison. It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone. If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.

Can you give some examples of this type of job done flawlessly? i.e. where all bad actors are stopped and no good actors are hurt in the process

Make fraud impossible through technical means or make "abuse" impossible by just not providing any incentive to do so (for example, make the service paid so that there is no longer any incentive to "abuse" the free service)?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#447

Post by Nextgrid »

justinlloyd wrote: post #222

I had a Google Pixel phone. Less than a year old old. Treated with kid gloves. Always kept in a case. Pristine condition. An approved Google software update bricked it. This was, by all accounts, a known issue. The phone was under warranty. I sent it back. They shipped me a scratched up refurbished phone. It ran fine for a week then bricked itself due to the same software update. I sent that back. They sent me anothe…

Litigation and actually hitting the scum in the wallet (the only thing they care about) is the proper and only way to discourage such behavior in the future.

If every consumer wronged by a supplier did this we wouldn't be having this discussion at all because suppliers would never let such problems happen or escalate that far.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#448

Post by kodah »

jbay808 wrote: post #364
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. > Facebook's identity verification. The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.

I don't disagree, but a lot of websites these days choose to offload their login systems to Google and Facebook to certify that a unique human is on the other end. It solves real problems for them like password management, bot detection, astroturfing, sockpuppetry, stolen accounts, and so on. For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offer…

What links those accounts is not special, it's OAuth2. I don't think there's anything stopping different groups from running open OAuth2 endpoints that just provide a PGP based identity service. I actually wondered why Keybase didn't start an OAuth2 endpoint, because it'd put a big dent in some of the services you described.

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#449

Post by justinclift »

Nextgrid wrote: post #445
johnisgood wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able…

Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).

Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?

Re: Google disabled my husband's account

#450

Post by Nextgrid »

justinclift wrote: post #449
Nextgrid wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).

Wonder if they've blocked the providers of temporary virtual phone numbers?

Presumably the known providers such as Twilio, etc are blocked, but there are small companies that provide numbers from the same number ranges as the big cellular carriers so those are completely undetectable.

I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.

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